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NOOK Book(eBook)

Overview

Far from being any apostle of freedom as commonly understood, Ayn Rand, the fountainhead of the tea party movement and the Paul Ryan Budget, sought to take the world back to the socioeconomic system of the so called dark ages, with a new noble class based upon greed and ruthlessness, and a new serfdom characterized by abject poverty and subservience to the new noble class for the vast majority of people on the planet. While Rand called her viewpoint Objectivism, the book shows that it has at its core an extremely nihilistic subjectivism. It also shows that despite its claims to be logical and rational, Objectivism is in fact highly irrational and riddled through and through with contradictions. Last but not least, Rand's "ethics of selfishness" are shown to be little more than a mockery or parody of the very concept as generally understood.

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About the Author

The author first read Rand in the late 1960s while an engineering student at Illinois Institute of technology, and not knowing any better, was originally impressed it. It was because of Rand's praise of Aristotle that he then switched his major at IIT from electrical engineering to philosophy, and soon afterward enrolled in courses at neighboring institution, The University of Chicago, and began studying philosophy under the 20th century's greatest Aristotle, Richard P. McKeon. It was from McKeon that he learned that Aristotle never said "existence exists" as Rand claimed he did. If he had, he would have committed a fundamental which McKeon called "entitizing." Author then went on to study under leading exponents of what he calls the "left wing" of the University of Chicago, such as Alan Gewirth, which focused upon universal human rights, and had little or no connection with the economics department of Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek, and had little use for the likes of Leo Strauss. This was the University of Chicago tradition of former president Robert Maynard Hutchins.